Great Regulars: Most ambitious of all, the songs are settings

for poems by e.e. cummings, Rachel Field, Robert Graves, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ogden Nash, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others. Merchant, 47 and a longtime poetry devotee, says, "I found a new connection to the possibilities of the mother tongue as I started to teach my child to speak."

[Natalie] Merchant's voice negotiates Hopkins' poignant sadness ("Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?"), cummings' profound playfulness ("whatever we lose (like a you or a me)/it's always ourselves we find in the sea"), Field's "girl in pink on a milk-white horse," and John Godfrey Saxe's six "blind men of Indostan" groping around the elephant.

from John Timpane: Philadelpia Inquirer: Lullabies from Natalie Merchant

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